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June 1960 | Volume 11, Issue 4
“Shall I Not Take Mine Ease In Mine Inn?”
Text Complexity Grade Level
9
The old saying about many an American inn, that “George Washington slept here,” is not necessarily so apocryphal as we sometimes assume. His campaigns kept him constantly on the move, and wherever he found himself, there was likely to be an inn nearby. On foot, on horseback, or even in a coach, a day’s journey was very short by our modern standards, and accommodations had to be available nearly everywhere. New Jersey alone, just after the Revolution, had 443 inns.
In earlier days all diversions centered there. The furnishing of food and shelter to travelers and to horses, and of liquid comfort to neighbors, was not the establishment’s only function. Whatever there was of novelty in entertainment or instruction went on at the inn, and it served as the gathering place for folk on scores of duties or pleasures bent. Legal notices and governmental proclamations were posted there, newspapers were on file, mail was distributed, and the taproom was a clearing house for news. A constant panorama passed within the walls and before the doors.
The inn also served the townspeople. Indeed, its importance to its local neighbors was far greater, day in and day out, than to the occasional traveler. Inns and taverns played an important part in the political and military affairs of the colonies. Law courts sat in their public rooms, not only in small towns but in the cities. A center of events, a center of alarms, the inn in many a city and town saw some of the most dramatic acts in the colonists’ struggle for independence.
The inns of one colonial town—Princeton, New Jersey—may serve as examples. They heard the first rumblings of the war; they saw the departure of a company of undergraduate volunteers from the College of New Jersey—later Princeton University—in 1775, the arrival of the British and Hessians in 1776, the colorful visit of the Delaware Indians in 1779, Washington and Rochambeau with their armies in 1781 marching toward Yorktown. Paul Revere plowed through the mud in December, 1773, on his way to Philadelphia with news of the Boston Tea Party; and several times, in 1774 and 1775, he passed by again. Delegates to the First Continental Congress came in 1774 and recorded their impressions. In 1783, the frightened Congress found refuge here and gave Nassau Street unwonted metropolitan airs. And here also, on April 19, 1783, the Reverend Dr. John Witherspoon, president of the college, delivered “an excellent discourse to a very numerous audience” in celebration of the signing of the peace with Great Britain.
In the eighteenth century inns became even more important when the pack horse was replaced by a more modern system of overland travel—the stagecoach. A glamour like that which enshrines the cowboy has been thrown over those stagecoaching days. But the glamour hides the uncomfortable realities.
The stagecoach of colonial days, and of the first part of the nineteenth century until the coming of the